The Bass Wore Scales (The Liturgical Mysteries)

by Mark Schweizer

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” said Pete, already losing interest in riling some guilt out of me. The Ginger Cat wasn’t a threat to the Slab Café, and Pete had good reason for wanting them to stay in business. Pete Moss was, as they say in investment circles, a generator of multiple cash streams. Over the past twenty years, he’d been buying the old buildings on the square, renovating them and renting them out to the merchants of St. Germaine. This strategy was starting to pay off in a big way. The Ginger Cat was in one of Pete’s buildings.

  “Which boat do you want?”

  “How many do you have?” I asked.

  “Three,” said Pete. “No. Four.”

  “Four?”

  “I’ve got the sailboat over at Emerald Isle. I’ve got that bass boat. The cabin cruiser—it’s in the shop—and the rowboat.”

  “I need the rowboat.”

  “It’s tied up on the lake. Been there since Easter.”

  “Down at the dock?” I asked. Our little mountain lake was just outside town and surrounded on three sides by the Mountainview Cemetery. The remaining adjacent property had belonged to Malcolm Walker and was now in the possession of his ex-wife, Rhiza. Malcolm was doing prison time and wouldn’t be seeing this or any lake for quite a few years to come. The Mountainview Cemetery didn’t offer an access road to the shore, but anyone could park up on the hill overlooking the lake and walk down. A small dock, set on piers, jutted about eight feet into the water. There were “No Swimming” signs every fifty feet or so, but every once in a while a couple of kids would sneak down there to cool off. And cool off they did. The water came right off the mountains and was usually about sixty-eight degrees or so.

  “Yep,” said Pete. “It’s tied up at the dock. That is, unless someone’s stolen it.”

  “I kind of doubt that,” I said. “Where would they go? The lake only covers a couple of acres. And anyway, I’m a detective. If it’s stolen, I’ll find it.”

  “I was just kidding. It’s not stolen,” said Pete. “I was there yesterday. I took Molly out for a nice boat ride just about dusk.”

  “Molly Frazier? Kenny’s sister?”

  “The very same.”

  “Are you two an item? You working on wife number four?”

  “Well, you never know,” said Pete, thoughtfully. “Love seems to be in the air.”

  “Speaking of love in the air, have you talked to Noylene lately?”

  “Actually, I have,” said Pete. “She’s doing a brisk business at the salon, but she’s going to close on Mondays and Tuesdays. She says that ever since she opened Noylene’s Beautifery, she doesn’t meet as many people as she used to when she was waiting tables. So she’s going to come back to work here on Monday and Tuesday mornings.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be glad to have her back. If the help at the Ginger Cat is any indication, good waitresses are mighty hard to come by. But that wasn’t the news I was talking about. It seems that Noylene has a beau.”

  “Really? Who?”

  “Meg said his name was Woodrow DuPont. He just bought Kenny Frazier’s farm.”

  “Oh sure,” said Pete. “Wormy DuPont. He’s lived around here off and on since he was born. I went to school with him.”

  “Wormy?”

  “Yeah. Wormy. He got the nickname in second grade. The school nurse got on the intercom and told him he had to come to the office for his worm medicine.” Pete laughed. “I remember it like it was yesterday.”

  “Poor kid.”

  “Oh, he never seemed to mind,” said Pete. “Wormy is better than Woodrow anyway.”

  “How about ‘Woody?” I offered.

  “Never thought of it,” Pete shrugged. “And ‘Wormy’ sort of fit him, you know?”

  * * *

  I stopped by Noylene’s Beautifery and Dip ‘n Tan on my way around the square. Noylene Fabergé had graduated from an on-line beauty college and opened her salon a couple of months ago. She and her son, D’Artagnan, had invented the immensely popular “Dip ‘n Tan”—a contraption that allowed the customer to hang from a trapeze and be gently lowered into a vat of tanning fluid. Noylene’s first few attempts at getting the recipe just right had resulted in a rash of orange-colored St. Germainians, giving some substantiality to the scuttlebutt around town that we had been invaded by giant mutant carrots, or, at the very least, Yankees.

  There were three cubicles in Noylene’s Beautifery, and they were all in use. Noylene was in the one furthest from the door. The other two were staffed by a couple of young ladies from Boone—the signs on their mirrors identified them as Darla and Debbie. These name-tags were decorated with various cute personal items and complimented their officially framed licenses to practice the art of beauty in the state of North Carolina. Noylene looked up as I came in and waved me back.

  She was diligently teasing the hair of a woman I didn’t know. I smiled and nodded, trying to avert my eyes as the woman glared up at me. I had forgotten the one rule of beautiferies—a visitor is not allowed to see a woman whose coif is in a state of disrepair. If you’re there getting a haircut, that’s one thing. But you mustn’t wander in off the street without an appointment and gawk in horror. It’s bad form. Noylene didn’t seem to mind, however, and started talking to me as soon as I walked up.

  “Man, what a day! I’m ready for a break. My dogs are barkin’.”

  “Fridays usually this busy?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” answered Noylene, the rat-tail comb flying in her hand. “Summer’s here, and everybody wants a cooler ’do.”

  “I heard you were going to work over at the Slab a couple of mornings a week.”

  “Yeah,” said Noylene. “I miss it, you know. I mean, here I get to talk to folks, and this is my life’s work…doing hair…but I miss seeing the regular people. And anyway, Brother Kilroy says that we are supposed to find our gifts and use them. I have two gifts. The gift of beauty and the gift of getting your breakfast out on time.”

  “Well, I’m sure Pete and Collette will be glad to have you back.”

  “That’s the other thing. Collette’s got to plan her wedding. She’s going to be busy enough with that.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “By the way, I heard you have a new boyfriend.”

  “Wormy? Yeah, he and I go way back. He just bought Kenny’s farm you know.”

  “I just heard.”

  “I think he’s got big plans,” said Noylene with a smile.

  * * *

  Five-thirty in the morning comes early—especially on a Saturday—but I’d told Moosey that I’d pick him up at six and, by golly, a promise was a promise. I was ten minutes showering and getting dressed, five minutes eating breakfast and pouring a thermos of coffee from the coffeemaker that, luckily, I’d remembered to set the night before, and two minutes throwing a couple of poles and my tackle box into the back of the truck. Baxter, the Burmese Mountain Dog that shared my house, heard me rummaging around and was happily waiting by the truck, his entire hindquarters a-wag at the prospect of a ride. I’d gotten Baxter for Meg as a Christmas present, but now he stayed at the cabin where he had the run of the mountain.

  “Not today, boy,” I said and handed him a dried pig’s ear. The big dog chomped on it delightedly and made his way to the front porch, apparently appeased.

  It was a fifteen-minute drive to the McCollough’s trailer, so I’d probably be right on time. I didn’t worry about being a couple of minutes late, though. Moosey would have been on the front porch waiting for me since the sun came up. It was foggy and a little chilly at six in the morning, but the weatherman had promised a beautiful seventy-degree day with just a few clouds. I figured he might get lucky. I started the old truck and slipped a CD into the player—just about the only thing that was up-to-date on this dinosaur. The Chevy had no power steering, power brakes, power windows, power door-locks, fuel injection, air conditioning or computer chips. I also suspected it had no springs in the seats or shocks to speak of, and a family of mice was living in the air cl
eaner. The sound system was top-notch though, and I was treated to the sounds of Anton Bruckner’s Te Deum sung by the Berlin Philharmonic Chorus. I knew the text well enough that, even though my Latin was as rusty as the tailgate latches on the truck, I had no trouble being drawn in by the poetry as well as the music.

  Te Deum laudamus: te Dominum confitemur.

  We praise you O God: We acknowledge you to be the Lord.

  The Te Deum was heading into the fourth movement as I pulled into Ardine McCollough’s drive. Moosey, as I expected, was sitting on the edge of the porch, his chin in his hands, tapping his tennis shoes on the dusty ground. He had his old cane pole wedged upright against the porch post, and as soon as he saw me, he stopped counting the ants (or whatever was consuming his interest at the moment), grabbed the pole and ran toward the truck.

  “Hey there,” I said. “You ready to catch some fish?”

  “You bet!” exclaimed Moosey. “Hey, can I ride in the back?”

  “No, you may not. Put your pole back there though unless you want to use one of the rods I brought.”

  “Can I?”

  “Sure. Do I need to tell your mother we’re leaving?”

  “Nah,” said Moosey, leaning his cane pole back against the porch. “I’ll tell her. She’s prob’ly still in her drawers.”

  “Go tell her then.”

  Moosey disappeared into the trailer and banged out of the door a minute later carrying a large coffee can.

  “Almost forgot our worms,” he said. “I’ve been keeping them in the fridge, but Mom says she’ll be glad to see ‘em go. She says they’ve been causing a racket.”

  “Really,” I said. “I didn’t know worms carried on so.”

  “It weren’t the worms so much. Pauli Girl reached in there to get some coffee.”

  “I see.”

  “She screamed for about a minute, and now she won’t go near the fridge.” Moosey’s ears perked up. “Hey, what’s that music?”

  “That is the Te Deum of Anton Bruckner for chorus, orchestra and organ.”

  “What’re they saying?”

  “Hmm,” I said, listening harder to pick up the text. Per singulos dies benedicimus te. “They’re saying ‘We bless you every day and we praise your name forever until the end of the world.’”

  Moosey nodded thoughtfully. “Are they talking about God?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s a good song.”

  “It is indeed.”

  * * *

  The fog was still heavy on the lake as we walked down the hill from where I parked, but we could feel the breeze beginning to pick up. I had the two rods and the tackle box; Moosey was carrying the can of worms carefully with two hands. I’d taken Pete at his word when he said the boat was tied up to the dock, but now, not seeing it where I expected to, I’d wished I’d taken the time to walk down and make sure the rowboat was where Pete had left it. I needn’t have worried though. It was there, just as Pete said, tied fore and aft to the pier. It was an old fashioned wooden rowboat, about twelve feet long with two bench seats, a pointed bow and a flat stern with a place to mount a small motor. It had been painted red, but was now in need of another coat. I looked it over as Moosey set the worms down on the dock. The oars were in the locks, everything was ship-shape and, as my good friend Pete once remarked, “the boat bobbed lightly on the water just exactly the way that a bowling ball wouldn’t.”

  “Mom says to wear a life jacket,” said Moosey. “I can swim, all right, but she says I might hit myself in the head with the bait bucket and drown.”

  “She knows you pretty well, Moosey. The life jackets are under the seats. Get mine out, too. Who knows? You might hit me in the head with the bait bucket.”

  “Naw. We don’t even have no bait bucket. Just this ol’ can of worms.”

  “Even so,” I said, helping Moosey with the straps. “We don’t want any accidents. It would put a damper on the whole weekend.”

  “I guess,” said Moosey. “Oh yeah—I forgot to tell you. I’m helping with the birds tomorrow.”

  “The birds?”

  “You know. For Penny…umm…” Moosey thought hard. “Penny somethin’,” he finally said. “At church.”

  “Pentecost. You’re helping with the birds for Pentecost?”

  Moosey nodded and we both got into the boat. I untied one of the ropes, he untied the other and we pushed off from the dock into the still lake.

  “Are you going to St. Barnabas tomorrow?” Moosey asked, as I dropped the oars into the water.

  I hadn’t been back to church to play since the third Sunday of Easter. It had been a month of Sundays, and now Pentecost was upon us. I was still on an extended leave-of-absence from the church, and Father George had hired another substitute organist on the advice of several vestry members. Unfortunately, the only organist available in this part of the world was a one-legged, retired music teacher named Henrietta Burbank. Meg was less than impressed by her skills. She might have been a pretty good pianist, but, in Meg’s opinion, an organist should, ideally, have the use of both legs. Oh, she could walk around well enough, but space was tight up in the choir loft, and her prosthetic limb wasn’t constructed to bend in all the directions needed to situate oneself on the organ bench. Her solution to the problem was to unstrap her leg and lay the appendage up on the console like some kind of medieval relic—the leg of St. Henrietta the Untalented. Marjorie, a choir member since the middle-ages, said that the plastic prosthesis was just “grossing the choir out.” Meg told me, in an effort to guilt me into ending my sabbatical, that almost all her playing was done on the manuals (although she’d throw in a few pedal notes if they were above middle C) and consisted of hymn arrangements written for piano. I had heard from a number of parishioners that things in the music department were less than satisfactory, and although I hadn’t been back to church to play, I had gone with Meg to the Ascension Day service. The choir didn’t sing, but Henrietta had been in fine form, the Feast of the Ascension being an opportune time to play a Josh Groban arrangement of You Raise Me Up.

  “Told you,” whispered Meg.

  “Yes, you did,” I whispered back.

  “Can you see her leg from here?”

  “If I spin around. She’s in the back you know.”

  “Everyone can see it when they come back from communion. And also when they leave at the end of the service and she’s playing the postlude. You know how you’re not supposed to look at an accident, but everyone does? That’s what it’s like. You can’t help but stare. It’s right there!”

  “Why doesn’t someone ask her to put it on the floor?”

  “Everyone’s embarrassed. I mean, it’s not every day you have to tell the organist to get her leg off the console.”

  “Reminds me of my organ performance class in college,” I said, and was rewarded with an elbow in my ribs.

  “Are you going to church tomorrow?” Moosey asked again, and my attention snapped back to the task at hand—rowing us to the center of the lake.

  “I guess I will. It’s the birthday of the church.”

  “How did you know what we were doing?” asked Moosey suspiciously.

  “Huh?”

  “We’re having a birthday cake.”

  “Really? When?”

  “Miss Brenda says when she calls us up to the front for our time with Father George, we’re gonna have cake and sing Happy Birthday.”

  “Ah,” I said, finally understanding. “The Children’s Moment.”

  “Yep.”

  “Is that when the birds come in, too?”

  “Nope,” said Moosey. “That’s later. Did you bring any candy bars?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “But you can’t have one until at least seven o’clock. I promised your mother.”

  * * *

  It was a glorious morning once it got started. There were a couple of herons stalking us along the lakeshore, pausing just long enough in their inspection of us to skewer whatever frog or fish ven
tured into their reach. Moosey and I had our lines in the water, but enjoyed no luck. Not even a nibble. We’d even switched worms several times as our wrigglers became waterlogged. After a couple of hours of fruitless angling, we decided to call it a morning and head in for some breakfast. As I rowed to shore, the turtles that had come out to take advantage of the sun splashed back into the water, disappearing in the concentric circles that marked their departure. It made for a very pastoral tableau. We tied the boat to the dock, shelved the oars, stored the vests under the seats and made our way back up the hill.

  “Sorry we didn’t catch anything,” I said to Moosey.

  “That’s okay. We’ll catch them tomorrow.”

  “Umm…I can’t tomorrow, Moosey. We have church. Remember?”

  “What about after church?”

  “Well, fish usually bite early in the morning. If they’re hungry, that is.”

  “What about Monday? You said you’d help me catch a fish,” reminded Moosey.

  “I did?”

  “Yeah. So what about Monday?”

  “How about next Saturday?”

  Moosey pursed his lips. “Well, okay. But if you want to go fishing before that, you’d better call me.”

  “That’s a promise.”

  * * *

  It was a night for bratwurst, sauerkraut, Anchor Steam beer, Cuban cigars and Prokofiev—specifically, my new recording of the Classical Symphony and the Third Piano Concerto. I sat at my typewriter, sipping my cold beer and contemplating what passed for a plot. Meg was reclining on the overstuffed leather couch, reading a magazine, and I could smell the bratwurst starting to simmer in the beer. I’d take them out in about ten minutes and put them on the grill.

  “Are you working on your Bulwer-Lytton entries?” asked Meg. “I think I may have a good one.”

  “May I hear it?”

  “Nope. Not yet. It needs a little refining.”

  “I’m actually working on my detective story,” I said. “And if there happens to be some overlap, well, so be it. Two birds with one stone, as it were.”